Supposed Trudeau Liberal mantra: believe the victims.

Actual Trudeau Liberal motto: humiliate victims.

That truth was revealed, yet again, this week on Parliament Hill. A House of Commons committee was conducting a rare Summertime hearing. The subject: violence against women.

It’s an important issue. Canadian women are five times more likely to be targeted with sexual assault. In their lifetimes, four in ten Canadian women have experienced some form of violence from a partner. In 2022, almost 200 Canadian women were murdered, mostly by men – that’s one every two days.

So, the Status of Women committee scheduled a meeting this week to hear from police officers and victims themselves.

The Liberals on the committee, it appears, were in a bad mood. They didn’t want their Summer vacations interrupted. They adjourned early, back in June, and won’t be back until the middle of September: that’s three months on the golf course and away from legislative business.

So, the Grits were grouchy.

Cait Alexander, a young woman who heads an advocacy group called End Violence Everywhere, was there to give evidence. Her family sat behind her as she spoke. “I’m supposed to be dead,” Alexander said. She showed the assembled MPs harrowing photographs of three years ago, when her then-boyfriend beat her and left her for dead.”If you haven’t met a survivor and a victim’s family, well, now you have.”

After Alexander finished her opening statement, Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld spoke. You could be forgiven for thinking that Vandenbeld is a nobody who couldn’t get picked out of a one-person police lineup. She’s worked for the United Nations (naturally), and she’s been investigated by the Ethics Commissioner (practically a Trudeau Liberals job requirement). That’s about it.

Vandenbeld spoke. She made a few vanilla comments about the issue before the committee, and then she went after Conservative MPs for “politicizing” the issue. Which she, herself, then did. She wanted to talk about abortion.

The witnesses who had been invited to speak were dumbfounded. So were the Tory and NDP MPs present. Cait Alexander couldn’t believe what was happening. She held up the photos of her battered body again. She was crying. An advocate of battered women, Megan Walker, spoke: ”This is the problem. Did [Vandenbeld] listen to anything that was said this morning?”

The meeting descended into chaos, while the female victims of violence looked on, appalled. MPs started raising points of order. NDP MP Leah Gazan said: “I’m disgusted because I wasn’t given a chance to put forward witnesses when I’m representing ground zero for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.”

At that point, Cait Alexander got up and left, in tears. Walker got up and followed her.

Some of the MPs apologized to Cait Alexander’s Mom, who was still in the committee room. Her mother was unmoved. “Sorry isn’t good enough,” she said. “We’ve heard ‘sorry’.”

And that, really, was the best and only response to a disgusting, appalling display by Anita Vandenbeld her ilk: saying “sorry” isn’t enough. It doesn’t cut it.

But Vandenbeld is a Trudeau Liberal, isn’t she? She’s a card-carrying member of the cult that professes to be feminist, and then sticks by the boss when it’s revealed that he groped a female reporter at a beer festival in 2000.

They’re the ones who regularly chastise Conservatives (and others) for being insufficiently on the side of women – and then look the other way when their boss kicks two impressive women, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, out of cabinet. For talking back to him.

They’re the ones who insist that they want to ensure women have the right to choose – when they could have passed a law enshrining abortion rights at any time in the past decade. But didn’t.

By their words and their deeds, we know who the Trudeau Liberals are. Non-entities like Anita Vandenbeld show us, all the time.

They’re liars and hypocrites.

And, this week, they again reminded us that they don’t give a sweet damn about female victims of violence.

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If you had the impression this week that Benjamin Netanyahu was running for office, you’d be right. He is.

But the Prime Minister of Israel wasn’t running where he was this week, which was at a podium in Washington, D.C., speaking to members of the U.S. Congress. Bathing in the standing ovations he received – reportedly more than any foreign leader has ever received when addressing congresspeople – Netanyahu could be forgiven for wishing he was running for re-election in America, and not Israel.

Back in Israel, you see, he is really, really unpopular. Presently, he is facing three separate corruption prosecutions; he is met with protesters wherever he goes in Israel, including hundreds who have camped outside his residence, for months; and he is deeply unloved by as many as 70 per cent of Israelis, who want him out. They disapprove of his inability to get all the hostages home, they disapprove of how he is conducting the war against Hamas, they disapprove of him.

But, mostly, they disapprove of something that is little-known in places like America, but is very well-known in Israel. Namely, what Netanyahu and his government knew about Hamas’ savage attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – and what, if anything, he did about it.

Because, on balance, it doesn’t look he did much. It doesn’t look like he did anything meaningful to prevent the worst progrom in the 76-year history of the Jewish state – a vicious, sadistic, Satanic attack that left 1,200 men, women and children dead, over 200 taken hostage, and an untold number of women and girls subjected to sexual violence that is beyond comprehension. For that, Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing a near-impossible task: re-election.

The damning facts are well-known in Israel – and, in some cases, are actually still to be found on the Internet. They can be seen in videos created by Hamas and their evil cabal, and which were uploaded to assorted platforms.

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Jean Chretien and Joe Biden.

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about how they were similar. Their similarities, in fact, were such that I was persuaded to support the latter because of my many years of work for the former.

Consider: both politicians were older than most of their competition, and were often dismissed as ‘yesterday’s men’ as a result.

Both regularly mangled grammar and syntax – Biden because he had a childhood stammer which he overcame, and Chretien because he reportedly does not speak either official language.

Both men came from large and poor families in small towns. Biden, from Scranton in Pennsylvania – and Chretien from Shawinigan in Quebec.

Both men spent many decades in government before getting the top job. Both were regularly underestimated by their opponents, and they greatly benefited from that. Both had disdain for the elites in their respective parties.

And, this: both were fighters. Meaning, if you pushed them, they would push back.

When Paul Martin’s thugs commenced trying to push Chretien out, he dug in his heels, and ran again – winning an unprecedented and massive third majority government in 2000. And when the Martinites kept pushing, Chretien said he would leave – 18 months later. Team Martin went on to lose the majority, and then lose government.

For weeks we have been witnessing something similar with Joe Biden.

Full disclosure: I volunteered for Joe Biden in 2020, getting out the vote in a dozen different states. I was proud to do so. But after I saw his performance in the first (and almost certainly only) presidential debate with Donald Trump, I knew – as someone who has great affection for him – that Joe Biden should not run for a second term. It wouldn’t be good for him, for America, or for the free world.

Lots of Democrats immediately had the same view. And, in the intervening weeks, they went public with their desire to push Joe Biden out. Veteran members of the US Senate and the House of Representatives said Joe should go. More mutineers were stepping up to the microphones every day.

A Covid-stricken Biden responded by retreating to his beachfront home, and refusing to engage with his critics. His staff told the media that he wasn’t going anywhere, and likened the naysayers to bedwetters. He was going to run again as the Democratic presidential candidate, they insisted.

This is where the Biden and Chretien similarities end.

Chretien left with a 60 per cent approval rating. He left on the date of his choosing. He left his party in good shape, and he left the country with a balanced budget. He left the way he wanted to.

Biden, meanwhile, has been unpopular with American voters, and he was getting more unpopular by the day. He was dragging his heels and dragging his party down. He was putting himself, and his ego, before the interests of his party and his country – something he promised never, ever do.

The writing was on the wall, as they say. But Joe Biden seemed to be the only person in America who couldn’t read it – or refused to look.

I have worked for older veteran politicians who sometimes talk funny and are underestimated. I know the species. If you take a swipe at them, you’ve got to be prepared to get it back, twice as hard. They really, really don’t like to be pushed around.

But in the end, Jean Chretien knew when to leave, and he left on his own terms. Joe Biden didn’t know it was time to leave.

Until today.

 

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